I am very late to the party re. the discussion of Justine Larbalestier's stunningly honest blog post about the cover of her excellent new book LIAR. (I say stunningly honest because Justine is the biggest liar I know. I mean, other than myself.)

Here's what happened: LIAR's hugely unreliable narrator is black. But she is portrayed as white on the book's cover. Justine was (understandably) horrified about this, and never agreed to it, but authors do not have final say in book jacket design.

There are certain cover rules that everyone in publishing believes, including: 1. photographic covers sell, and 2. images of African Americans on covers don't sell. Both of these rules are absolutely idiotic if you think about them for longer than about three seconds. The rules of covers are another cart-and-horse problem, the sort that businesses often run into when they operate via anecdote and "the gut" rather than collecting and analyzing data.

Ultimately, I think retail accounts share the blame with publishers. B&N and Target are gun shy about making big buys of books featuring photographs of African Americans on the cover, and so are independents.

So, okay. I'm going to argue that 1. Book cover design strategies are currently driven by short-sighted misassumptions, but that 2. (un)fortunately, it won't matter much longer anyway.

Argument 1: U Guyz R Doin It Rong

Right now, book covers are intended to get a book to the broadest possible audience without being too dishonest about the content of the book. (Publishers are regularly somewhat dishonest, which is probably why Bloomsbury thought they could get away with the LIAR cover.)

An example: The original cover of An Abundance of Katherines featured math on it, because it is a book about math. The new cover features clone-like images of pretty girls. Now, there can be no question that pretty girls appeal to a broader audience than abstract mathematics.

But but but but but but: I would argue the job of a cover is not to get the book to the broadest audience but instead to get the book to its best audience.

Cover design is important at point of sale, but most books are sold by word of mouth--friends recommending the book to friends. The pretty girl cover will sell more at point of sale, but will it sell to the people who will like the book and recommend it to their friends? That should be the first question about a cover.

The centrality of that question gets lost in bookstores, which by their nature overvalue point-of-sale purchases and undervalue word-of-mouth purchases. (After all, a word-of-mouth purchase may or may not occur at your store; a point-of-sale one definitely will.) So by overvaluing the opinions of retail accounts, publishers can end up hurting their overall long-term sales.

Argument 2: (Un)fortunately, it won't matter much longer

So, like, no one seems to have noticed this, but publishing is, like, dying?

(Quick observation: The market capitalization of Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Books a Million COMBINED is about $1.75 billion. The market capitalization of the video game store Gamestop is $3.92 billion; if you include the market cap of independents, our entire brick and mortar retail business is worth less than half of Gamestop.)

So here is the bad good news: It's pretty difficult to imagine physical bookstores being a widespread phenomenon in 10 years. There will be some stores, of course. (More independents than chains, I suspect.) Publishers will finally throw off the oppressive yoke of free returns, whereupon they will discover that they still can't make money. They will shrink or go out of business.

All of that will suck, but this won't: BOOK COVERS WON'T FREAKING MATTER SO MUCH AS A SALES TOOL. Designers will be liberated to design the coolest jackets without so many commercial constraints, because the focus will be on the right audience instead of the broad audience. Word-of-mouth will be king again.

We've seen this happen in the recording industry. And we'll see it in ours.

That said, publishers and retail accounts shouldn't wait to abandon racism as a marketing strategy.